1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication systems, and more particularly, to base station assisted peer discovery to facilitate efficient peer-to-peer (P2P) communications.
2. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various telecommunication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, and broadcasts. Typical wireless communication systems may employ multiple-access technologies capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing available system resources (e.g., bandwidth, transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access technologies include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, single-carrier frequency divisional multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems, and time division synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA) systems.
For many applications (e.g., social networking applications) it is important for a device to discover other devices within the vicinity. A device may broadcast a peer discovery signal which conveys an “expression” that can identify itself. The peer discovery information is usually very small. Note that although the peer discovery information may be fixed in a long time period, the bits that encode this information may change rapidly due to privacy concerns. The device may also need to detect other devices' peer discovery signal. Due to the fast decaying of radio signals, a device may not be able to directly detect another peer device's peer discovery signal. Further, different devices may operate in different frequency bands or under different operators, and it may not be feasible for a device to transmit/receive in all possible bands to detect all other device's peer discovery signal.
Base stations can receive peer devices' peer discovery information, exchange this information among base stations, and rebroadcast the information so that peer devices in a wide area may discover each other. With base station relayed peer discovery, periodic transmission of time varying peer discovery expressions to the base station may cause an excessive amount of short message traffic in the wide area network (WAN) and may result in excessive overhead communications. Therefore, a system and method to assist in facilitating efficient communication of a peer-to-peer communication discovery expression is desired.